Henry Ingersoll Bowditch, MD, a longtime Mass General physician, abolitionist and public health pioneer, was no stranger to controversy.

The son of a famous mathematician, the Harvard-educated Bowditch was on his way to living a comfortable, upper-class life as a Mass General physician in the 1830s.

His moral outrage was spurred, however, when he witnessed a mob try to tar and feather William Lloyd Garrison, the editor of an abolitionist newspaper, in downtown Boston in October of 1835.

Bowditch would later say that to see a man being persecuted for speaking about slavery within sight of Faneuil Hall and within steps of Bunker Hill—two symbols of American freedom—instantly transformed him into an abolitionist.

Taking up the cause of abolition was not without consequences, however, as it cost him some friends among Boston’s upper class and prompted some patients to leave his practice.

Bowditch was undeterred by these setbacks, however.

He continued to be an advocate for equality and a free-thinker throughout his decades-long career as a physician, researcher and public health expert.

Early Years and a Call to Action

Born in Salem, MA, on Aug. 9, 1808, Bowditch was the son of Nathaniel Bowditch, a prominent American mathematician who is often viewed as the father of modern maritime navigation.

Bowditch attended Salem Private Grammar School, Boston Latin School and Harvard Medical School. He spent a year as a house physician at Mass General from 1830 to 1831 before traveling to Paris to continue his medical studies.

He received his medical degree in 1833 and returned to the US to begin his medical practice.

1835 marked one of the great turning points of Bowditch’s life, when he was an eyewitness to the Garrison mob—a group of wealthy Bostonians who gathered outside the offices of the pro-abolitionist newspaper The Liberator to oppose a speech by William Lloyd Garrison, the newspaper’s editor, to the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society.

The members of the mob seized Garrison and marched him through the streets of Boston with a rope tied around his waist.

They intended to tar and feather Garrison, but were stopped by the mayor of Boston before being able to do so.

The incident left Bowditch boiling with indignation and turned him into a staunch abolitionist. It was not an easy position for him to take at the time, particularly when it came to his connections to Boston’s elite.

“He was mocked, sneered at, passed on the street without recognition by his father’s old friends; but his courage never faltered, his faith in humanity and the final triumph of his cause never failed,” according to a biography of Bowditch.

Bowditch was an admirer of the abolitionist John Brown and was the first white man to welcome the escaped slave Fredrick Douglass to Boston.

Douglass later praised Bowditch for greeting him as an equal. “In the light of my experience with slavery and of my contact with white people in New Bedford…this conduct on the part of Dr. Bowditch bewildered me. I hardly knew how to account for it. It revealed to me a possibility which I could hardly persuade myself could exist.”

Bowditch was also a founder of the Anti-Man-Hunting League in Boston, a secret oathbound society that was established to confront slaveholders and slavecatchers who came to Boston to capture freed or escaped slaves. 

According to a profile of the league by the National Park Service, “the plan created so much fear that no Southerner or slave catcher ever came to Boston.”  

Taking a Stand for Equality at Mass General

In 1841, Bowditch once again took a controversial stand for equality when he advocated for the continued admission of Black patients to Massachusetts General Hospital after the trustees passed a law excluding them from the institution.

Bowditch decided to challenge the ruling by attempting to admit a Black girl with pneumonia to the hospital. He then offered to resign his position when she was refused.

“I regret very much indeed to separate from any who have been so uniformly kind to me, as you all (individually and collectively) have been, and from an institution in which I have ever had the strongest feelings of pride, and for whose welfare I shall never cease to labor,” he wrote the trustees.

“But I must leave, for under the action of that rule, I have been the means this day of excluding a poor girl from that charity, which as it seems to me, belongs as much to her as to any other person, especially as she came recommended to me by one long connected by the hospital.”

“I cannot, you will readily see, consent to do this again, or to remain longer in a situation where I may be obligated to violate thus my views of justice,” Bowditch continued. “I therefore would respectfully resign my office of admitting physician of the hospital.”

Faced with the prospect of Bowditch’s resignation, the trustees backed down and the patient was admitted for care.

Clinical, Research and Public Health Contributions

As a clinician, Bowditch became a vocal advocate for the process of thoracentesis, a procedure that involves the use of a needle to drain fluid from the lungs to test for infection and make it easier for the patient to breathe.

He endeavored to convince the profession that this procedure was both life-saving and posed little to no danger to patients. Most other doctors at the time were not in favor of the procedure, but Bowditch continued to advocate for its use until he was satisfied his views were accepted.

“Through the efforts of Bowditch, the treatment of pleural effusion, heretofore performed by surgeons alone, was changed from a hazardous, painful procedure to a simple operation that could be handled by any medical man with the aid of only an aspirating needle and a suction pump or syringe.”

Bowditch is also recognized for introducing inductive reasoning into American medical science, popularizing the stethoscope, contributing to the understanding of tuberculosis and laying the groundwork for the practice of public health.

In 1869 he was appointed along with six others to form the first state board of health in the United States.

Bowditch was also an advocate for gender equality in medicine, who was recognized for his “untiring and chivalrous efforts to secure [women] equal opportunities and recognition with men in the medical profession.”

Legacy and Contributions

Bowditch died at the age of 84 on Jan. 14, 1892. He was preceded in death by his wife, Olivia (Yardley) Bowditch who died in 1890. The couple, who met in England in the 1830s, had been married for more than 50 years.

Today, Bowditch is remembered for his advocacy for equality and his contributions to the field of science and medicine, particularly in the fields of tuberculosis and public health.

He left behind more than 90,000 manuscript pages of records of patient cases, as well as ten printed papers and 66 pamphlets.

Due in part to Bowditch’s writings and his personal influence, American physicians adopted the stethoscope as an aid to the diagnosis of diseases of the heart and lung, writes W. Bruce Frye, MD, in a remembrance in Clinical Cardiology.

In a remembrance of Bowditch published by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences after his death, the writer says that the perspective of years will be needed to gain a true measure of Bowditch’s life and work.

“He had a kind of wisdom, a directness of intuition, foresight, breadth of view, and largeness of nature, with absolute independence, uncompromising honesty, energy, enthusiasm and marvelous industry, joined to the genius for investigation and to the scientific and humane spirit, that place him as the great man of the medical profession of New England in his day.”